Fisher Stevens Reels ‘Em In

“Fisher’s like a good-time guy,” said Gina Gershon, who’s been to more Fisher Stevens get-togethers than she cares to count. “He’s like the catalyst for a lot of stuff that happens.”

Mr. Stevens, now 45, no longer eats meat after a pilot he did for a show called The Green Team, filmed on location at a slaughterhouse. He’s cutting back on fish too, after co-producing The Cove, a new documentary about the dolphin slaughter in Japan, and the reason for tonight’s celebration. He wasn’t drinking, either. He’d just returned from a week at Sting and Trudie Styler’s villa in Tuscany, where they host an annual, very intimate documentary film festival each year.

“It’s this incredible week,” Mr. Stevens explained to his friends, as they contemplated the wine and organic saki-based cocktail lists. “But every night was like, ‘Let’s go have a drink, let’s go drink wine!’ They make their own wine, and it’s insane!”

He’d made some new friends at Sting and Trudie’s, like Bobby Sager, a wealthy businessman–turned–full-time do-gooder upon whom the NBC show The Philanthropist is loosely based, as well as an amazing guy called Pablo who doesn’t speak any English and was involved in a doc about his fight with the oil companies responsible for a spill in the Amazon. Bobby and Pablo probably do not yet realize what that new friendship will entail—they’ve been entered into the human networking service that is Fisher Steven’s brain.

“I’m so proud of Fish,” Ms. Gershon purred.

I asked her if they had ever dated.

“Our story is way too complex,” she said. “We met at Naked Angels, we didn’t like each other much at the beginning. And then one time we were having martinis and it just flipped and we were in love with each other.”

“Fisher and I were engaged for about a day,” offered playwright Nicole Burdette, also a founding member of Naked Angels, a downtown theater group that is still active. Ms. Burdette had come up with the name.

“I was the guy who got everyone together,” Mr. Stevens asserted. There remains some debate as to who exactly the original crew was, but aside from the ladies at the table, the other thespians Mr. Stevens brought together were Rob Morrow, Marisa Tomei, Ron Rifkin, Pippin, Tim and Sarah Jessica Parker, among others.

The Cove is the first film that Mr. Stevens has been involved in since stepping down from his role at Greene Street, the production company he co-founded with producer John Penotti in 1996. There, too, his skills as connector were key. His good buddy Matt Dillon introduced him to the billionaire financier Louis Bacon, with whom Mr. Stevens started hanging, and who later invested $30 million in Greene Street. But life as a studio executive had lost its appeal for Mr. Stevens. More and more, money was getting in the way of his creative instincts.

Just the other day, he told me, while filming a scene with Forrest Whitaker and Adrien Brody in Das Experiment, he thought to himself: “God, this would have been a great one for Greene Street, if only I had known then what I know now.”

“The independent film business has changed,” he explained. “I mean we were the first company to take hedge fund money to make money, and then there was this big influx and now it’s like over again. And all those independent film companies are gone; you know, Warner Independent and Picture House, and you know all those small companies that used to buy our movies, and now they’re just giving them away.

“You know Harvey’s kind of out of the game now, and once Harvey went out, it really hurt,” he said, of fallen mogul Harvey Weinstein. “’Cause he was really driving this whole industry.” But that’s no longer Mr. Stevens’s business. These days he’s all about documentaries, where there is no money to be made. Period.

“So I’m doing a new one in Africa,” Mr. Stevens said of his new project, which involves a polluted lake, or some such. “Dylan, did I tell you I’m going to Africa a lot now?”

Sitting down at the far end of the table, Dylan Tichenor, who edits all of Wes Anderson’s movies, did not appear to be interested. “Tell us about that story I heard once, when you were in a white suit and you went wondering around Seventh Avenue. …”

Long story short: He was 20, in a white suit, accidentally took mescaline, ended up talking to a homeless guy, who convinced him that money didn’t matter in life, and then, after Fisher had passed out, robbed him blind.

Mr. Stevens got involved with The Cove through his friendship with another billionaire, tech guru Jim Clark. It was a connection Mr. Stevens came close to missing.

A girl he’d been dating named Jo said to come meet this guy who’s got a boat.